Tuesday, October 27, 2015

When going to school looks not a little like
being in a prison, we're no longer talking about a subject's itinerary through
discrete times and spaces—the narrative geography wherein a student, routed
through a school that can only fail her, finds herself pushed into juvenile or
adult criminal justice systems. The rigidity of disciplinarity
in the post-public public school system intimates the tendential identity of
the prison-function and the school-function. When a teacher calls an
administrator who calls a cop who then brutalizes a student for failing to move
from her seat when ordered, neither students nor observers need schooling in
Althusser or Foucault to see the school operating as a prison.

All the same, school and prison’s tendency
toward an identity of function can be hard to see. First, it is only emergent, a
tendency, a possible future that nonetheless enacts itself in the present and
points us toward what is in the process of becoming. To read this process of
becoming is not the same as declaring an accomplished identity. Indeed, to say today
“the school is a prison” is also to compute with the fact that it also is not a prison, not really, not yet. In
describing a tendential identity, then, one always risks a kind of
overdramatization, the inflation of an instance into a sign of things to come.

Second, this emergent identity is masked by the
entrenched persistence of signifiers—and not a little sentiment, too. We
continue to call “schools” institutions that are functionally indifferent to
the task of fostering the creative, intellectual, and affective capacities of
those whom we continue to call “students.” We continue to call “teachers” those
people whose skills and good intentions are perverted by an apparatus and a
world that doesn’t care about anyone’s intentions. And these signifiers are so
sticky because they are so affectively saturated. We all have a favorite
teacher, and few of us are prepared to acknowledge that we were bonding to someone
who unwittingly substitutes for a cop. And then plenty of folks on the left are
wary of critiquing school and schooling today for fear of sounding like a Milton
Friedman acolyte. Let’s just remember that it is utterly possible for two
opposed political orientations to have a critique of a shared object; that
doesn’t mean they have a shared critique. One can mark the tendential identity
of schools and prisons and (as I do) still support teachers unions—if only to
block and roll back the recoding of schools by the police function.

The idea of the school-to-prison pipeline gets
around these barriers through dissociation. The to situates the students in a cartography of linked but discrete
spaces, which enables us to cognitively and affectively sunder school from prison. The case of the phrase is
accusative, but the critical disposition and political fantasy it sustains is in the ablative. And
so it becomes harder to see the prison in the school.

My recourse to grammar might seem pedantic, but
it’s not. Slogans are the residues of past struggles and the seeds of new ones.
They travel so well because they are so economic in their language. And they
are so powerful because they teach so quickly. (Try to recall the first time
you heard the phrase “school-to-prison pipeline.” I actually can’t, because I
can’t imagine not knowing it, the way it let me rethink the institutional
fabric of the world. That’s powerful teaching, and all in just four words.) In
a movement phrase, every word counts, every word is made out of and remakes a
movement’s orientation toward the world.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to coin a new
slogan, but we need a different vocabulary—one that, in terms of grammar, opts
for the conjunction over the preposition. Where the preposition posits discrete
time-spaces, the logic of the conjunction allows us to see the overlapping but
non-identical functioning of these two institutions and their rationalities.
Non-identity matters: after all, the teacher called an administrator who called
a cop; the teacher and administrator could not beat the student on their own
authority. What that moment revealed was neither a school-to-prison pipeline
nor the achieved identity of the two. Rather, that moment displayed school and prison operating in the same
time-space as an articulated assemblage. Cop and teacher, hand in hand.

It also revealed, I think, the way that Spring
Valley High School is situated in a broader social terrain where school
functions as a prison—that is, where
the labor of human cultivation is subordinated to simple and authoritarian
order maintenance. In the school-as-prison, the aim and activity of pedagogy is
repurposed to conform to the aims of the police. To be sure, schools have
always worked to produce orderly subjects, but such ordered subjectivities were
produced through the pedagogical
process itself. (Just think of everything implied in the act of raising one’s
hand.) Now, police are taking over the application of discipline in schools,
and teachers and legislators are handing it over to them. Niya Kenny, the
student who filmed the event, was arrested for “disturbing
school,” an honest to Jesus law
that legislators recently attempted to amend
to increase fines from one to two thousand dollars and jail time from ninety
days to one year. (Thanks to Ed Kazarian for sharing the “disturbing school”
link.) This handoff in disciplinarity marks less a differentiation of function
between cops and teachers and more a willed subordination of pedagogical space
to the police. Think about this absurdity: a student refusing to leave her seat
sparks an event that compels the Richland County Sheriff to
fly back from the cop conference in Chicago like a sovereign returning to
his troubled land. In this school-as-prison arrangement, cops rule.

School and prison, school as prison, yes. But
the most troubling possibility, I think, is school or prison. By using this locution, I don’t intend to invoke the
uplift narrative that posits education as a means of avoiding criminality or,
really, criminalization—a narrative that the “school-to-prison pipeline”
concept has already undone. The or of
my “school or prison” marks not a choice between alternatives but an identity produced
through the indifferent interchangeability of functions. It is sort of like the
sive in Spinoza’s “Deus sive natura.”
It would sound like this: “School or prison—whatever, what’s the difference.” The
school is rapidly and intensively being inscribed as an institution in the
state’s carceral network; the logics of policing are overwriting the ideal
logics of pedagogy. The racialized poor of the U.S. are sent to school to learn
how to do time in prison, and the effectiveness of this pedagogy indicates the tendential interchangeability of school
and jail.

The minimal demand to combat this tendency is
very simple: No cops at school. Neither police nor private security guards
should ever be involved in administering ordinary classroom discipline. No
teacher or administrator should ever have the thought that this could be a good
idea or a necessary thing. These are pretty easy fixes, because incredibly
concrete. But minimal demands are just that—minimal—and the prison-function of
the school is not limited to the fact that cops are on campus. To think beyond
the minimal requires some account, perhaps, of the multiple systemic forces
that overdetermine the becoming-prison of the school. But the question is not
simply one of knowledge, of planning, of finding the best systemic points at
which to undo the carceralization of the classroom. It is also one of
dispositions and orientations and the creation of new imaginings of the world.
I’m thinking of the student who was beaten in South Carolina. By media
accounts, the student wasn’t participating in class but also refused to leave
it. Maybe she doesn’t like the subject, maybe she didn’t like the pedagogical
mode, maybe she was just tired and having a bad day, maybe she just hates
school. But her refusal to participate in a given pedagogical arrangement
interacts dynamically with her refusal to leave the scene of learning; indeed,
we might say she was beaten because her refusals to participate and to leave
staged the difference between the learning she wanted and the schooling she
got. The cop, then, was not simply enforcing order but reproducing a
pedagogical norm: You will learn this subject in this way and not express
dissatisfaction with this fact. This command links pedagogical modes across
varied institutional terrains, from the underfunded public schools to the neoliberal
charters to, indeed, my own classroom, probably, alas. Getting cops out of
schools will be meaningless if a post-police pedagogy is unimaginable; the cop
will always be invited back in and, indeed, will never have left. What I want,
then, is to imagine the time, place, and form of encounter whose possibility is
conjured in the student’s refusal to participate and in her refusal to leave—a
world of learning otherwise where desiring alternatives won’t get you clubbed
by a cop.